


Fire In Your Veins

by rvspberry (lostnoise)



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Injury, Flayed Steve Harrington, Heavy Angst, Hospitals, Hurt Steve Harrington, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Injury Recovery, M/M, Major Character Injury, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Near Death Experiences, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Steve Harrington, Psychological Trauma, Recovery, Trauma, Unreliable Narrator, aka no characters featured on screen die, no canonical character death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-13 07:33:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28774623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lostnoise/pseuds/rvspberry
Summary: “Mio… bambino,” Eleven whispered, and when Steve came to his senses, he couldn’t focus on anything but her big brown eyes staring up at him with fear and hope sparkling in them. “She called you… she called you mio bambino. You held onto her hands when she touched your cheeks.”Steve shivered, half stuck beneath the fuzzy veil of his memories, lived in and repeated for weeks now.“She smelled like rosemary,” Eleven continues, tears in her eyes. “She woke you up... to watch the sunrise. Red and orange on the horizon. Light spilling over the hills. Green, everything was so green.”~Or, the one where the Mind Flayer chooses Steve Harrington, not Billy Hargrove, to be its host.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Comments: 17
Kudos: 121





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Antarc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antarc/gifts).



> Read the end notes for the trigger warnings, which are also all tagged above.
> 
> I wrote this for Rina’s birthday. My dear, I hope you enjoy the first chapter and all the chapters to come!

_Today was his last day in Italy with his grandmother. They stood outside on the veranda, her house situated at the top of the hill, and they had been staring off into the valley as the sun rose._

_Nonna made sure to wake him up extra early so he could see it._

_It was beautiful._

_“Mio bambino,” nonna whispered, smiling and cupping his cheeks in either of her hands. She leaned down and pressed a kiss to his forehead._

_Steve reached up to hold her hands there and smiled right back, the missing-front-tooth grin of his seven-year-old self. He loved his nonna, loved how she smelled of rosemary and sunshine, loved her cooking and the smells of the kitchen, loved the way she loved him._

_The hugs, the kisses, the cuddles on her couch while they watched an old black-and-white movie in Italian._

_“I will always be here for you, mio bambino, never forget.”_

“Mio… bambino,” Eleven whispered, and when Steve came to his senses, he couldn’t focus on anything but her big brown eyes staring up at him with fear and hope sparkling in them. “She called you… she called you mio bambino. You held onto her hands when she touched your cheeks.”

Steve shivered, half stuck beneath the fuzzy veil of his memories, lived in and repeated for weeks now.

“She smelled like rosemary,” Eleven continues, tears in her eyes. “She woke you up... to watch the sunrise. Red and orange on the horizon. Light spilling over the hills. Green, everything was so green.”

Steve froze above her, breath caught in his chest. Light exploded around them in different colors; something shrieked, loud and ominous. Eleven had a cut on her head, a scrape, but it was her eyes that caught him.

“It was beautiful,” Eleven whispered. Steve turned his head aside. Eyes closing. Processing. What was going on? “She loved you.” She let out a soft sob, and Steve nodded, tears forming in his own eyes. “She really loved you. And you… you were happy.”

Steve couldn’t keep his eyes open as she reached up to touch his cheek, just like his nonna used to. He squeezed his eyes shut even as tears slipped out, dripping down his cheeks. He took a deep, shaking breath.

He’d been losing time for so long lately, weeks, unsure of how he got one place or another. Between his new job at the ice cream place and the Russian army base below the mall, things got a little fuzzy. He’d been waking up in random places, unsure of how he’d gotten there. He’d go to his shift, hang out in the freezer, and couldn’t pinpoint why, exactly, being cold felt so good. And then… then things would grow fuzzy.

He looked to the side and saw the monster, fully fledged and ready to attack Eleven. He knew it without knowing why, just as he knew he’d have to stop it.

Steve stood up, squaring off to face the Mind Flayer directly. A tentacle shot out at him, undoubtedly trying to get to Eleven, but Steve held his arms up to protect her and screamed at the pain of this- this thing, screamed from the effort of holding it back from Eleven.

Then more tentacles came, attaching all around his body.

He’d been so fuzzy when he woke up, but now, everything hurt. He had no idea what was going on, with all the yelling and screaming around him.

He just knew he had to protect Eleven. He had to.

He let his eyes flutter open only for an immense amount of pain to come crashing into his chest, a shot to the sternum, echoing throughout his body… he screamed and screamed and screamed until he passed out.

~

He woke up again with everything dulled. Fuzzy, but not the same way as before, not under a layer keeping him from knowing what was going on. The faint sounds of beeping, and low murmurs, sounded near him and when he finally pried his eyes open, Steve realized he was in a hospital. He couldn’t move where he lay on the bed, his body weighed down with blankets. It felt like someone was sitting on his chest.

“Mr. Harrington?”

Steve blearily glanced up at the doctor, the one who had been treating Will, standing beside the bed.

“Oh, good. You’re awake.”

Good? No, not good. Now that Steve was awake, things were coming back to him, and coming back stronger. The pain in his chest and arms, the aching of his head, the general fog he felt like he was wading through.

Worse, still, were the peripheral memories that Steve shut his eyes against.

Was Robin screaming because they got kidnapped by the Russians? Or did Steve… did Steve do something he shouldn’t have?

What about Carol, and Tommy? What about their parents?

He could hear the beeping of his heart raising from a machine next to him, and the calming tone of the doctor’s voice went strained alongside Steve’s nerves.

“Mr. Harrington, you need to calm down.”

But the memories came faster than Steve could wrangle them, let alone push them down. Carol’s parents in the trunk, dragging them to the abandoned steel mill on the outskirts of town with Carol and Tommy. Knowing that the Mind Flayer did things to them, things that Steve couldn’t… couldn’t really remember.

Did he kill them? Did he want to remember?

The beeping grew faster.

“Mr. Harrington, please,” the doctor tried again, but Steve was hyperventilating even with the tube down his throat.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the fear in the eyes of Tommy’s mom. The woman who baked him cookies for his twelfth birthday. The woman who helped patch his knees when he and Tommy got too rough in the woods, because Steve’s parents weren’t home.

Did he kill her?!

His ears rang with all the unanswered questions swirling through his head until a flurry of activity came around him and everything went black once again.

~

Waking up, after that, was more of the same until he could wake up without the memories bombarding him. 

And with the tube in his throat, it’s not like Steve could ask any questions. Couldn’t get any answers. He had to deal with all the stray thoughts and incomplete memories by himself.

Like the red spray of blood over the keyboards and buttons of the Russian base under the mall.

Or the frightened, stuttered breaths and whimpered fear from Dustin and Erica and Robin behind him.

At least the doctor was able to introduce himself at some point before the memories crashed into him harder than an eighteen-wheeler barreling down the highway.

He wanted to ask so many questions, and he tried to get Dr. Owens’s attention to ask for a pen and paper. But that’s when he noticed his hands covered in bandages, wrapped so much that he couldn’t even wiggle his fingers.

Maybe he couldn't move his hands at all.

The days grew long and tedious and repetitive as the hospital team slowly weaned him off the morphine. The pain surged back so strong, sometimes, that Steve couldn’t help but cry and whimper around the tube in his throat, gasping until something was put into his drip that made him fall back asleep.

A week after he was stable enough to be awake regularly, they took the tube out.

“You can breathe on your own now,” Dr. Owens told him, like that was the silver lining.

Which, sure, it was.

But getting it taken out hurt like a goddamn bitch.

Really, everything hurt. Breathing hurt. Shifting in bed hurt. Talking _really_ hurt, made him cough until his eyes watered and his chest ached and Dr. Owens had a nurse come back in to put something into his IV to put him back to sleep again.

“No more talking,” the doctor told him strictly, the frown creasing his face into a severe look, when Steve finally awoke later in the evening. “You need to save your strength to rest and recover.”

Steve wanted to cry. He couldn’t talk. Couldn’t write. Couldn’t see anyone beyond medical staff. Was he in hell? Because it felt like hell.

Dr. Owens tapped his chin. “Do you think you’ll be up to having visitors soon?”

Steve’s eyebrows raised and he nodded as best as he could. Having _anyone_ around other than the usual nurses or Dr. Owens would be welcome. Not that Steve didn’t like them - the nurses were nice, and Dr. Owens was nice enough, too. But without any outside contact, Steve felt like he was wasting away here at the hospital.

“Good. Not yet, but soon.” Dr. Owens wrote something down on the clipboard. “We’re going to bring in a specialist as soon as you’re able to speak. Her name is Dr. Sattler.”

Steve nodded, because there’s not a lot more he can do than that.

“Excellent. So, Mr. Harrington, we’ll check back in a few days and see how the speech is coming.”

~

Steve was bored. Out-of-his-mind-level of boredom. Pain medication put him to sleep, but once it wore off, he was awake and irritable because he was in pain, and so. Fucking. _Bored._

Unfortunately, boredom led to thinking. To remembering. The more time that passed in the hospital, the more Steve would remember.

Like knocking Robin unconscious. Or killing the Russians who threatened to keep him below the mall. Or killing Carol’s parents, leaving them in the abandoned mill for the Mind Flayer.

The last one haunts him the most.

Once Steve was able to rasp a few words clearly, Dr. Sattler came to his room and sat primly in the chair beside it. She was blonde with a kind face and thin-rimmed gold glasses that took up half of her face and sat atop her thin nose. She was tall - probably as tall as Steve - and she smelled a little like lavender.

It was a nice change from the rest of the staff who smelled like antiseptic and soap.

“I’m a psychologist,” Dr. Sattler told him that first day as she sat in the chair beside his bed. “I’m here for you to talk to.”

Steve didn’t want to talk. Talking meant telling, meant reliving the experiences, meant feeling it all over again. The desperation and the indifference, the urge to bury himself beneath the shroud of fuzzy warmth that came when the Mind Flayer took over.

Talking meant dealing with everything that happened.

But Dr. Sattler kept showing up, kept sitting in his room, and kept making small talk - about the weather, about Hawkins, about things going on in the world while Steve was stuck in the hospital. She was a constant, every day, until Steve felt like maybe… maybe he should tell her something. Give her a reason to keep showing up, because he didn’t want her to stop showing up.

So on the fourth day, he drank a glass of water and started talking as softly as he could manage.

“It’s hard to know what was real and what was planted in my head,” Steve confessed, staring idly at the thin hospital blanket covering his legs. “Half the time… I wasn’t even there. I disappeared. There’s a lot of time I lost.”

“Do you know what happened under the mall?”

Steve squeezed his eyes shut against the memories flooding his mind’s eye more to an against the question. He didn’t want to think about what happened under the mall.

Just… darkness. Fear. Bright red spraying over the panels.

“I remember… blood,” he chokes out, clearing his throat gently. He blinked his eyes open. “I think. I think I killed someone. Maybe more than one person.” Steve clenched his teeth so hard that his jaw aches. “Is- is my coworker-”

“Miss Buckley? She’s fine,” Dr. Sattler replied, the pen in her hand stopping its motion as she regarded him. A frown appeared on her face. “Did you remember something? Something else about her?”

“We got kidnapped. Under the mall. By… by the Russians. And-” Steve coughed a little, covering his mouth with a bandaged hand, even as it hurt to do so. Steve pulled his hand back and winced at the black-and-gray goop left behind. “I just. Remember seeing blood. On the- the panels, and the keyboards and buttons. They were doing experiments. The Russians, I mean, and… they threatened to keep me locked up.” Steve’s eyes grew a little wet, so he closed them. His next words were shaky. “He didn’t like that.”

“Who is he?”

“The Mind Flayer,” Steve whispered. He couldn’t look at her as his whole body started to shake.

“The… entity?” Dr. Sattler wrote something down vigorously, pen scrawling across the paper. “The alien that possessed Mr. Byers last year?”

Steve couldn’t answer as the memory of Carol’s mother’s neck beneath his hands rose in his mind. The way she had struggled, the blank stares of Carol and Tommy standing with him. The fear in her eyes.

The tears that clung to her eyelashes.

“Mr. Harrington? Steve?!”

Steve shook harder, breathing with rapid, stuttered motions that made his chest ache even more. The beeping around him made it hard to discern the ringing of his ears, and he struggled to breathe, gasping for deep, painful breaths.

“Steve, calm down. It’s okay. Everything will be okay. Shhh. It’s okay, Steve.”

Blissful darkness followed Dr. Sattler’s words.


	2. Chapter 2

When he woke up after his first meeting with Dr. Sattler, he expected the same sights that greeted him every other time he woke up.

A nurse, fiddling with his drips, making sure he was hydrated and getting accurately medicated. Another writing on a clipboard about his numbers - blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels, whatever else the machines read. Dr. Owens mumbling to himself about Steve’s numbers, or being calm but inquisitive and overly curious about what Steve had gone through. Encouraging Steve to cough up the black goo in his lungs.

“The effects of the creature,” he explained ruefully when Steve was red-eyed with tears streaking down his face. Coughing up the sickness, the infection, physically hurt more than anything else lately. The doctor isn’t the most personable, but he would pat Steve on the back whenever he finished coughing up what felt like an entire lung. “It’ll fade with time. The creature is gone now, Mr. Harrington.”

Steve knew Dr. Owens was trying to be reassuring, but it fell flat when said creature left Steve with so many awful things. With hands he couldn’t use, with lungs filled with black sludge, with a body that aches any time he moved. With terrible, terrifying memories.

However, that morning, Steve woke up to a face familiar from before the hospital.

“Robin,” Steve croaked, eyes wide. It rocked him to the core. All those memories of them being tortured together, the tears clinging to her lashes, the way she’d whimpered his name—

“Steve!” came another voice, and suddenly Dustin was beside his bed with his hands curled around the guards that kept him from accidentally slipping from the mattress.

Steve sighed happily, his shoulders slumping as the tension in him released like a puppet whose strings were cut. Dustin was okay too, then. Steve didn’t do anything to either of them. His eyes slipped shut and he squeezed back the tears rising up; that was good. That meant he got them out somehow, or they got themselves out of the Russian base. It meant they were okay. That Steve didn’t hurt them the way he feared.

Steve really wanted to rub at his chest with how it ached.

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Steve scanned him over. He didn’t know how long he’d been at the hospital, but he didn’t see any apparent wounds on his young friend which was a comfort. When his eyes cut over to Robin again, he took in the soft bruises where she’d been roughed up by the Russians when they’d been kidnapped.

Before— before Steve disappeared and the Mind Flayer took over again.

“Hey Dustin.” He tried on a smile, and it must have looked promising because Dustin is smiling back with his wonky teeth, making Steve’s gaze soften affectionately. “Sorry if I scared you, buddy.”

“I’m just glad you’re alive,” Dustin whispered. He reached out to touch Steve’s arm and rubbed his thumb over the bare skin above his elbow, right above the bandages which wrapped over his hands and up his forearms. “We were so worried, Steve.”

Steve nodded. He could understand being worried about him.

“I was worried about you guys, too,” Steve told them, looking up at them with wet eyes. He blinked back the tears welling up, unable to help himself. He’d been so worried with only snatches of memories that he couldn’t even distinguish as real or fake. “All of you. I can’t- my memories are—”

“Shhh, Steve, it’s okay,” Robin tells him, coming over to pat his hand awkwardly. “We’re all okay. You got us out of the base.”

“Well, kind of,” Dustin interjected.

The Mind Flayer got them out of the base. Steve hadn’t been the one in control of his body until he nearly died defying the creature possessing his body and suppressing his mind.

Robin elbowed Dustin in the side.

“The important thing,” she continued, glaring at Dustin as he rubbed his side but looked properly contrite, “is that we got out. And we’re safe. And… Steve. You saved everyone.”

“I… what?”

“You totally stood up to the Mind Flayer,” Dustin replied. He looked so earnest, so eager for Steve to give himself some credit. Steve couldn’t help but smile back at him, and Dustin perked up. “I’m so glad you’re awake, though. Things have been so weird without you. Robin became friends with _Billy Hargrove_ of all people, and—”

“Hargrove? _Really_ , Robin? Of all the macho asshats in this town, you befriended the one who beat my face in last fall?”

“Listen, it kind of just happened,” Robin said placatingly, wincing as she held her hands up. “He was there when we needed help, when you were… you know.”

Possessed. An empty vessel that the Mind Flayer filled with the worst sort of instructions, and demands, and necessities. Bodies. Always more bodies. More death. More destruction. Steve could still hear their screams.

“But you’re better now!” Robin continued, but Steve looked at her with blank eyes. Her smile slowly faded.

Dustin tried his best to bring Steve back to the present, chiming in, “You saved El. You saved _all_ of us. The Party. Hawkins. Maybe even the whole world, Steve. You’re a hero.”

Steve shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. No. He almost killed the Party. He almost killed all of Hawkins, almost helped destroy the whole world, just by letting that thing take over his mind. He- he killed people. And Dustin and Robin had no idea, had no clue what he was capable.

Tommy’s parents. Carol’s parents. The Russian soldiers in the base. Blood. Fear.

Death.

So much death. And so much blood, all around him.

“...eve? Steve!”

Steve blinked his eyes open, seeing Robin and Dustin leaning forward, their heads nearly touching as they hung over either of the edges of his bed. The door opened and all three sets of eyes snapped over to watch Erica giggling as she stepped in with none other than Billy Hargrove trailing behind her with his usual smug grin.

How much time had Steve lost? Was it happening again?

Billy fucking Hargrove was standing in his hospital room, the grin slowly fading from his face to be replaced by a wide-eyed stare. Something like fear crept into those blue eyes and it jogged Steve’s memory.

The Russian base. Billy.

 _Billy_ had come with them? Followed them down upon Erica’s urging?

How much of the summer was Steve missing?

The beeping on his heart monitor sped up, backgrounded only by the rushing of blood in his ears and the shallowed panting of his breath. His chest ached, his vision went gray around the edges.

“Steve, stay with me buddy,” Dustin begged, his voice choking up with emotion, and if Steve could, he would have reached out to soothe the kid that was practically his little brother.

As it was, nurses rushed into his room shouting and pushing his visitors out into the hallway.

Everything went black again.

~

Steve was getting really tired of passing out all the time. He was getting really tired of his brain being unable to handle everything he went through. He was getting tired of all the flashbacks, all the memories in which he couldn’t sort truth from fiction, all the nurses rushing in and Dr. Owens’s pitying looks and his own inability to control himself.

Dr. Sattler was sitting in the chair next to his bed when Steve opened his eyes. He sighed at the sight of her, even as she greeted him with a small smile and her fingers laced together over her knees.

At least _she_ looked well rested and like she’d had more than just sponge baths and careful hair washing in bed.

Steve still couldn’t see his hands.

“Soon,” Owens had assured him with a soft pat against Steve’s shoulder. “We can take the bandages off soon.”

Soon couldn’t come quickly enough.

“How are you feeling Steve?” Dr. Sattler asked him even as she made no move to grab her pen nor the clipboard in her lap.

“Tired,” he croaked back, shutting his eyes. “I hate— I have all these memories and every time I try to start going through them, I get all. Freaked out. Overwhelmed.”

“Talking about how it makes you feel might help. So, you say you get freaked out and overwhelmed. Let’s start there.”

“I just told you,” Steve replied irritably. All he wanted to do was see outside of this damn hospital room. He was antsy being cooped up for so long, being stuck in one place eating shitty hospital food and losing all the definition to his body. He felt like— like an invalid, which Steve supposed he was, now. But he didn’t have to like it. “What else is there to say?”

“How about we talk about why they make you, as you said, freaked out and overwhelmed?”

“Because,” Steve started, but he wasn’t sure where to take the sentence from there.

He licked his lips and searched for the words, wishing again that he could pick at his blankets, or something. _Anything_ to help keep him focused. He gripped the blanket between his toes at the bottom of the bed and clenched his foot up tight.

“I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. Because sometimes— sometimes. The Mind Flayer, he would make me see things that weren’t there. Like shadows, or… or he’d make me see memories, but. Twisted.”

Vines curling around his ankles when he stepped outside and looked at the pool earlier that summer, staring into the tree line with growing fear. Memories that he couldn’t have had of— of Barb, poor Barb Holland who went missing in Steve’s backyard. Her being dragged underwater, taken to the Upside Down. And those mixed with memories of the summer — taking the kids to the pool. He’d see the kids scrambling for the surface, those same curling vines pulling them under blackened water. Being told in whispers that they’d all be dead. They were going to die, one by one.

And Steve would be unable to withstand the heat and the sun and the whispers and the fake visions of the kids drowning, so he’d go sit in his car with the air condition turned up. Would wait in the shadiest part of the parking lot while the Party played away the afternoon under Hargrove’s watchful eye. 

“Steve, come back.”

The words punctured through whatever veil of silence descended over him, and he glanced up with wet eyes to look at Dr. Sattler.

“There you are,” she said quietly, giving him a sad smile. “I’m not going to push you to, but I really think talking about these memories will help, Steve. It’ll get them out of your head and into the open. The bandages on your hands will come off this week… Maybe we could have you work on journaling them.”

Steve nodded slowly and clenched the blanket in his toes again.

“Can I have visitors again tomorrow?” he asked her in a small voice.

He was nervous that she’d flat out deny his request, but Dr. Sattler twines her fingers together and regards him curiously.

“Do you think having them around will help you establish fact from fiction? Reality from false memory?”

“I think I can talk to them about what happened to know… to know what I did and what I didn’t do,” Steve offered up. “I had these memories where I thought I killed them. They could help me.”

Dr. Sattler nodded once. “Then I’ll recommend it to Dr. Owens.”

Steve perked up at that. “Really? Just like that?”

“Just like that,” she replied, fighting back a smirk. Steve relaxed into the bed and let out a short exhale. “I can’t guarantee he’ll sign off on it, but…” She flexed her hands and dropped them to the armrests on either side of her. “He probably will take my recommendation. He wants to see you get better, Steve. We all do.”

“I want to get better, too.” Steve knows that to be true. Part of him wishes he could go back to how things were before the Mind Flayer got a hold of him that night on his way home from dropping off Dustin.

But the other part of him, the darker part still firmly caught in all the terrible, awful things swirling through his head, knows things will never be the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things have to get worse before they get better... And we'll get there. Eventually. ;)
> 
> Let me know what you guys think in a comment, leave a kudo, subscribe if you want updates, and feel free to come follow and interact with me on twitter or tumblr:
> 
> <https://twitter.com/rvspberryjonas>
> 
> <https://rvspberryjvm.tumblr.com/>
> 
> I usually post alerts to the updates on twitter day of!

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: This deals with the aftermath of Flayed!Steve. That means medical recovery and psychological recovery, descriptions of violence, and implied murder. Like the tags state, no characters who have been shown on screen die, but Steve is the unreliable narrator so he doesn’t know what he has or hasn’t done for obvious reasons.
> 
> ~
> 
> I hope you enjoyed the first chapter! No Harringrove quite yet but we will get there, I promise. Let me know what you think in a comment and please consider leaving a kudo as well!! Feel free to come yell at me on twitter or tumblr:
> 
> https://twitter.com/rvspberryjonas
> 
> http://rvspberryjvm.tumblr.com/


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